


The Start of Something

by Adina



Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 02:15:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9857513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adina/pseuds/Adina
Summary: Peter never thought El would fall for Neal's dubious charms.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in the early first season, between the pilot and second episode. This can be seen as a prequel of sorts to [Especially the Lies](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9857561), but it's not necessary to have read that to understand this.
> 
> Originally posted October 20, 2010. This was written mid-season-one, with the knowledge we had then of Neal's background.

It started innocently enough--most things with Caffrey did--with Peter's phone ringing at 6:30 on a Thursday night, a month after they got back from Belize.

"Hey, El," he answered, dumping his files into a pile. "I'm just on my way home now." Caffrey was not watching him, not laughing, not even smirking at him, damn him.

"Oh. Okay, good," she said, sounding distracted. She yelled something at someone, but must have covered the phone because he couldn't hear what. "Is Neal there?" she asked abruptly.

"What?" He looked at Caffrey, who was still not smirking, apparently studying the tracker on his ankle with slightly suspicious intensity.

El yelled at someone again. "He's left already, hasn't he? Damn." The phone crackled loudly in his ear. "I need his cell phone number."

"No--I mean, he's here--" Peter handed the phone over to Caffrey, wordlessly.

"Elizabeth," Caffrey spoke into the phone. Peter stepped to the side where he could watch Caffrey's face, but none of the expressions flitting across it meant anything to him. "Forty-five minutes," Caffrey said at last. "If--" He paused again. "Okay, fifteen, then." Another short pause. "Will do." He disconnected and handed the phone back. "Elizabeth said to remind you to walk Satchmo," he said, grabbing his hat. "She didn't have time before she left." He waved and was gone.

***

El didn't get home until eleven, which gave Peter plenty of time to check Caffrey's anklet, wonder, worry, check Caffrey's anklet again, check his history for the last month, check El's work schedule for the last month, swear, worry some more, and wonder what the hell was going on. Not to mention walking Satchmo, of course.

El walked in at eleven, dropped her briefcase on the coffee table and collapsed to the sofa beside him. "Ugh," was her only greeting.

"Bridezilla?" he guessed. The worst ones were usually the brides, but she shook her head.

"Charity fundraiser," she said. "The co-chairwomen in charge were at each other's throats and the DJ was drunk." She leaned against his side and put her head on his shoulder. He nudged her upright again and started working loose the knotted muscles at the back of her neck. She groaned and pulled her hair to the side, out of the way. "Have I mentioned you have magic hands?"

He smiled. "Once or twice." It probably wasn't fair, but he waited until she was relaxed, her head bowed over her chest, before asking, "What was Caffrey doing in a bakery?"

"Mmm?" She half lifted her head. "Oh, he was picking up the replacement cake. The idiot caterers got the wrong cake--Happy 50th Anniversary! The bakery got the right cake back before it was cut, but they couldn't deliver it until eight and with the co-chairs sniping at me and each other--"

"Oh." Cake, check. According to El, not a single bakery in all five boroughs was capable of delivering the right cake more than two tries out of three. "What was Caffrey doing at your fundraiser?"  
  
She tipped her head back to frown at the ceiling. "Grazing? Foraging?"

"Huh?"

She tipped her head back further to give him a wry smile. "No man who owns his own dinner jacket will ever starve to death in Manhattan."

"Shit." Caffrey had been at every Burke Premier Event in the last month, at least the ones inside his radius. "El, I'm sorry. I'll call the Marshals in the morning, get his radius restricted at night. I'll keep him out of your hair."

El twisted in his arms, glared at him. "Like hell you will!"

It was June, Caffrey's landlady, all over again. "El, he's a convicted felon!" Caffrey could play women--hell, he could play men--pulling the sympathy card at will. Peter never thought El would fall for it.

"He flirts!" She was nearly shouting. "He flirts with the mothers of the brides. He flatters their fathers and dances with their grandmothers. I swear he's the only reason I didn't murder Mrs. Eli Fucking Stevenson tonight!"

Peter dropped his head against the back of the sofa. Of course Caffrey did. It was what he did. The idea of Caffrey loose among the well-to-do of Manhattan was more than a little terrifying. "He's a convicted felon," he repeated. "Swindler. Con man. Cheat."

El glared again. "He distracted the co-chairs from hell until the guests arrived. Would you rather have posted bail after I hit them both over the head with a serving tray?"

"El--"

"Peter." Her tone made it perfectly clear that she'd expended her last drop of patience for the night.

He threw up his hands. "Fine!"

***  
"Peter--"

Peter looked up from the DiNardi files to find Caffrey standing--no, _lounging_ \--in the doorway of Peter's office.

"Neal." It wasn't an invitation. Checking Caffrey's tracker had shown that he had spent most evenings in the last week mooching at various fundraisers and gallery openings, though at least they weren't El's events.

Caffrey gave an ingratiating and faintly--and fraudulently--apologetic grin. "I need out of my radius tonight." He held up a hand before Peter could explode. "Just half a mile! For a few hours."

Peter snorted. Of course he did. Give Caffrey an inch and he'd ask for an inch and a half, and before you knew it he was a mile away and accelerating fast. "Why? No, skip that. Where?" Why was obvious--Kate again. Or some scheme Peter didn't want to know about, any more than Caffrey wanted to tell him about it.

"A new gallery near the MoMA," Caffrey said. "Sans Reproche."

Caffrey. Out of his radius. At an art gallery. Peter could just hear Hughes's reaction to that. "No."

Caffrey didn't argue, just pulled out his cell phone and dialed. "Hey," he said. He paused a moment, listening, before adding, "Peter said no." He listened for a moment more and then held out the phone to Peter.

Peter gave him a long hard look before taking Caffrey's phone. "Yes?" he said into the phone, wondering which of Caffrey's associates he thought could persuade Peter.

"Hi, honey," El's voice rang through. "Listen--"

Peter muffled the phone against his shoulder and glared at Caffrey. "You do not use _my wife_ in whatever scheme you have hatched this time, Caffrey! Do you understand me? Or so help me I will send your ass back to prison so fast--" Peter's phone rang.

Caffrey was backing up, hands spread at shoulder height, a few feet back from the door now. "You should answer that," he said.

Peter took out his phone, not taking his eyes off Caffrey, not trusting him not to run as soon as Peter was distracted. And yes, okay, he had the tracker on, but this was Caffrey, after all. "Yes?" he barked into the phone.

"I asked Neal to come tonight," El snapped back.

"El--"

"I need him at the gallery tonight," she said more calmly.

Peter stood up and shut the door in Caffrey's face. "What part of 'convicted felon' don't you get?" he demanded.

"Neal wouldn't--"

"You don't know Caffrey," he snorted. Caffrey in an art gallery would make mischief just because he could.

"No, but you do!"

Peter blinked. "Yes. I do. That's why I'm saying this is a bad idea."

"You said it yourself--Neal has never betrayed a partner." Peter had said that when El had questioned Peter's safety alone with Caffrey in the field; Peter had assured her it was safe. "This is my business, my _job_ , and Neal knows it. I invited him; he's not going to pull anything."

"El--" Peter rubbed his forehead, looked at Caffrey watching him through the glass walls of his office. "This is still a bad idea. If something happens--if something goes missing--even if it's not Caffrey's doing--"

He could hear her smile, impossible as that was. "So come with him."

***

Caffrey was approaching a new pair of marks and deftly steering them away from the hors d'oeuvres table and towards the art hung on the walls. He was too far away for Peter to hear his words, but his exuberant gestures and animated expression made it unnecessary to hear the words as he extolled the virtues of a white canvas painted with pale gray shadows. He was flirting with the woman--no, with both her and the man, probably her husband--even though they were old enough to be Caffrey's parents if not Peter's, guiding them on to the next painting with one hand at the small of the woman's back and the other on the man's shoulder.

He showed them half a dozen paintings, waxing lyrical on each of them, before introducing the couple to a previous set of marks, a trio of slightly younger Wall Street types, leaving them clustered around a black basalt sculpture that looked like nothing much of anything to Peter. He slipped out after the five had started a lively discussion, returning to the hors d'oeuvres table to single out his next targets.

Keeping the guests away from the food wasn't part of Caffrey's briefing from El, or from the owner of the gallery, but it wasn't too surprising for a man being paid entirely in leftovers. Possibly it was just the best place to find people who weren't "engaging with the art," as the owner put it.

El slipped her arm around Peter's waist. "He's not doing anything wrong--you don't have to watch him like that." He glanced down; despite her words she was smiling.

Peter wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her closer. "I don't know, the prices here are criminal."

"Those prices are why the owner can afford to hire me." She glanced back to where the owner was holding court on a low white couch, his cast resting on a table in front of him. The man looked remarkably content for a gallery owner with a freshly-broken leg, forced to let someone else circulate among the guests at his grand opening. She nodded towards Caffrey. "So what's he doing wrong, Agent Burke?"

Peter shook his head. "Nothing." Caffrey had another new set, four young women in little black dresses, possibly college students or recent graduates. He had them laughing, which was drawing the attention of a similar group of young men. He steered the women to the wall opposite his most recent group, and the men drifted over to join them. Peter shook his head again. "This is the first time I've watched him work when it wasn't--" He censored that thought, because it _was_ important to El and even to Caffrey. "--when it's not my case. He's good."

She smirked. "Decorative, too. Good thing I met you first or I would have been the one following him into a life of crime."

"I wish you had," Peter said absently. El smacked his arm and he realized what he'd said. "I don't mean you-you, just...someone like you. You wouldn't jerk him around, disappearing four and a half months before the end of his sentence." He grimaced. "You could have made him go straight. Or at least retire."

"Neal would be Neal whatever I--or Kate--did," El said, shaking her head.

Caffrey slipped out of the group of twenty-somethings and leaned against the wall, still smiling, his face as animated as ever, and yet somehow looking tired and even discouraged. He caught Peter looking and smirked, his fatigue gone as if it had never existed.

Peter could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen Caffrey without a mask on--and this wasn't one of them.

***

The following Friday afternoon Caffrey was lounging in Peter's doorway again, his hands sunk deep in his trouser pockets.

"Let me guess. Another gallery opening?" Peter drawled. Not one of El's jobs this time, at least. She wasn't working tonight.

"Not this time, no." He seemed nervous, but with Caffrey that could mean anything or nothing. "Actually--" He grimaced. "I need to talk to Elizabeth. Will you take me home with you?"

"What? No!" El had the whole weekend off, a rarity in the world of event planning. They had better things to think about than not-so-former conmen. "You'll see her at her next event, I'm sure." Caffrey's attendance was as reliable as clockwork. "Talk to her then."

"In private," Caffrey said. He took a deep breath, pasted on an expression that could have passed for sincerity to someone who didn't know him as well as Peter did. "It's important."

"To you."

"To her!" Caffrey raised his hands. "Peter, I'm not lying to you. I need to ask her a question that's important to her." He took another obvious breath. "And then I need to talk to you."

"To me."

Neal grimaced again. "Depending on what Elizabeth says, of course."

If Peter didn't agree to this Caffrey would show up anyway, heralded by a call from the Marshals no doubt, and then the boundary violation would cause a mountain of paperwork on Monday. "Why do I have the feeling I'm going to regret this?" he said, picking up his phone to call El.

***

El was making stir-fry when they got to the house, more than enough for three people--enough for at least half a dozen if past experience was anything to judge by. "Hey, honey, almost done," she said, tilting her head up to collect a kiss. "Set the table?" It would have been completely normal if he hadn't had Caffrey in tow. "Neal, there's a bottle of wine in the fridge," she added, just in case there was any doubt that she was planning to feed Caffrey. Again.

Caffrey was...Caffrey...during dinner, keeping up a line of flirtation that might have been a little mechanical in places but otherwise was Caffrey at his usual. Apparently he didn't believe in discussing business over dinner. Assuming he had any business, of course, and this wasn't some weird scam to...get out of his radius and visit exotic Brooklyn?

"Peter said you had something to ask me," El said as soon as they finished eating.

Caffrey chased a few grains of rice around his plate with his chopsticks before setting them down and looking up at her. "Has Eliot Stanley paid you yet?"

El blinked. "From Sans Reproche?" She sounded as mystified as Peter felt. "Yes, just today, actually. With a nice bonus for you, too. I was going to send it with Peter on Monday."

Caffrey shrugged and shook his head. "Keep it."

It was probably the first entirely honest money Caffrey had earned in his life, and he was turning it down without even asking how much it was. Whatever this was, it was important to Caffrey. Not to mention to El, according to Caffrey. And even to Peter, if Caffrey was really planning to talk to him next. But first Caffrey had had to ask--shit. Peter glared at Caffrey. "What kind of scam is Eliot Stanley up to, Neal? And how are you involved?"

"Not a scam," Caffrey protested. Peter just kept looking at him. "Sans Reproche has five paintings by Tian Feng," Caffrey said at last. "Do you know his work?"

El shook her head, but it was Peter Caffrey was looking at. "Anything after the French Impressionists is a closed book to me," he said. The Modernists and Post-Modernists and all that sort fell into and out of favor too quickly for him to bother keeping track. "They're fake?"

Caffrey snorted. "Oh, they're real all right. They're stolen."

The other possibility, yes. "And you know this how?" Caffrey had better not have stolen them.

"Tian Feng died thirteen years ago," Caffrey said, his voice slightly remote, like he was reciting the words from the page of a book. "Those five were his last works. They disappeared sometime between when he entered the hospital the last time and his--" He hesitated just slightly, "--funeral."

"And you know this how?" Peter repeated.

Caffrey tilted his head, smiling as if Peter were failing to grasp the obvious. "I watched him paint them."

Thirteen years ago Caffrey would have been twenty, long before he first came to the FBI's notice, years further back than Peter had ever managed to track his history. For Caffrey to give this nugget of his past to Peter, to _Agent Burke_ , was no small thing. "You knew Tian Feng." Peter tried to give the name the intonation and pronunciation Caffrey had used, but suspected he failed.

"He and his wife took me in the first time I ran away from home." That was another nugget of his past that Caffrey was offering him, payment--enticement--to take the case.

"The first time?" El asked, the little smile on her face showing that she knew she was feeding Caffrey the straight line he was asking for, but that she was willing to do it anyway.

Caffrey gave a self-deprecating smile. "I was fourteen and thought running away to New York City was a good idea." Peter winced--that could have ended very, very badly. "They gave me the sofa to sleep on, Feng taught me to paint, and three days later Melinda--his wife--convinced me I had to go home."

"He didn't teach you to paint in three days," El said. She stood up, gathering the silverware and plates. Caffrey took the serving bowl, still more than half full of stir-fry, and followed her into the kitchen. Peter hesitated over the wine glasses. Would Caffrey be more forthcoming with another glass of wine in him? In vino veritas, except that Caffrey could lie as well drunk as sober. He gathered the glasses and bottle and turned to the kitchen.

"--the following summer," Caffrey was saying. "My parents thought I was--" He looked back at Peter and the open door. "Somewhere else."

Contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Nice. "Tian Feng taught you to paint," Peter said, putting the glasses by the sink and the wine back in the fridge. He turned in time to see Caffrey nod, slowly, warily. "He teach you forgery?"

Caffrey glared. "No!" Peter gave him a skeptical eye and got back a single snort of laughter. "Not deliberately." He looked away. "Feng was old school, believed you copied the masters until you learned their techniques, their brushwork."

Caffrey had applied those lessons to more than techniques. He almost looked embarrassed, if that was possible, but that was something to file away for later consideration. "The five paintings?" Peter prompted.

Caffrey shrugged, all assumed casualness. "They were missing when Mel got home from the funeral. No signs of a break-in, nothing else taken. She was planning to sell them to cover Feng's medical bills. Instead she lost everything--had to move back to Tennessee." A twist of his mouth indicated what he thought of the state.

"Reported to the police?" Peter asked.

Caffrey's mouth twisted. "For all the good it did, yes."

Peter nodded; most local LEOs didn't take the theft of art seriously, but they would still have to see if they could pull up the police report. They'd have better luck on Monday, though. In the meantime, the owner of Sans Reproche knew Caffrey and him by sight, knew their connection to El. Besides, he wanted his weekend with El. "Diane's working this weekend. I'll ask her to check out Sans Reproche tomorrow, see if Stanley can produce provenance for the paintings. That good enough?"

Caffrey straightened. "It's a start." He nodded towards the door. "In that case--"

"Directly home, Neal," Peter said. "Don't--"

Caffrey's eyebrow lifted, a broad smile on his face. "Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars?"

***

Monday morning El held out a bag as Peter was leaving. "For Neal," she said. He didn't have to open it to identify the smell of garlic bread and Sunday night's leftover cannelloni. He peeked anyway--there was even a small container of tiramisu.

"El--"

She stared him down. "Those paintings are important to Neal, but he sat on this for a week, just to make sure I got paid first."

El had fallen for Neal's charm hook, line, and sinker. "You can't trust him," he said. "He's Neal, he's always got his own angle."

Stretched up for a kiss. "Of course he does," she said after a too-brief peck. "So do I." She laughed at his expression. "Oh, honey. I'd steal Neal from you if I thought the Marshals would approve work-release to an event planner."

Peter could only shake his head, imagining the Marshals' reaction to the request. Neal would have to find something else to do after his four years were up--something not involving fraud, theft, and other forms of shenanigans, thank you--but event planning was never an option Peter had considered.

El gave him another kiss and put a hand on his back to push him towards the door. "You'll be late," she said.

***

El was waiting for him when he got home, mouth straight, arms folded across her chest. "So," she said, her voice obviously and deliberately even. "Eliot Stanley called today."

Peter froze in the middle of taking his holster off. "Oh." He let his hands fall. "El--"

She grinned. "To thank me." She dropped the pose, beamed up at him. "He seems to think that you went easy on him because of our association."

He glared at her but she only smirked. "We went easy on him because he had a bill of sale for the paintings. From one Robert Gates, who had a bill of sale from Tian Feng." Two could play this game.

"Tian Feng sold them?" She looked startled and more than a little sad. She was way too invested in Neal's twisted little history, damn it.

Peter shook his head, letting his smile show. "Signature didn't look a thing like Tian's, according to Neal. Melinda Tian confirmed it. Turns out Robert Gates is Ms. Tian's brother." Her mouth twisted and he had to agree--happy families seldom came to the attention of the FBI. "Apparently he didn't like his sister marrying an artist, especially a foreign artist."

El was still frowning. "You can't arrest him for the theft, though, can you? Statute of limitations--"

"Theft, no," Peter said regretfully. "But we can get him for fraud, selling the paintings with a phony bill of sale." Neal's mouth had twisted into an almost comical grimace at the news that Gates would be going down for fraud, Neal's own specialty. Neal wanted to believe that he was different from the criminals that they went after. "At least Ms. Tian gets the paintings back."

El nodded, leaning into his side. "You should have invited Neal over," she said. "To celebrate."

"El? Convicted felon?" he reminded her.

"He's your partner," El said, a half smile on her face.

Peter shook his head. "I'm his parole officer."

She chuckled. "Give it time."

***


End file.
